Karen Goldberg: It’s a really difficult transformation. It’s been a holy grail in catalytic chemistry to try to do this reaction.
Karen Goldberg is a chemist at the University of Washington. She’s trying to figure out a more efficient way of converting the primary component of natural gas – methane – into a liquid called methanol.
Karen Goldberg: The current industrial process to take methane to methanol is a multi-step process and it requires a lot of energy.
And it’s very expensive, she added. Goldberg explained that the key to making methanol more cheaply and easily is finding the right catalyst, a chemical that converts other chemicals from one form to another.
Karen Goldberg: We always have to be considering the practicality of the chemistry and how it’s going to translate to a large scale process.
She described a big payoff in efficiently converting natural gas into methanol, because natural gas and its by-products burn cleaner than gasoline. Goldberg added that a large percentage of natural gas is found in very remote locations.
Karen Goldberg: The idea is that if we can somehow convert the gas to a liquid, it’ll be easy to transport.
Worldwide, there are 6,000 trillion cubic feet of proven untapped reserves of natural gas, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
Karen Goldberg: Though green chemistry, we basically want to reduce the amount of waste we’re producing, and use less energy in the process of making all our fuels and chemicals.
Goldberg told EarthSky that many of the chemical processes widely used today are outdated and need to be reinvented to have a smaller environmental footprint.
Karen Goldberg: A lot of that chemical processing was put in place during the middle of last century. That’s old chemistry, and we have better ways to do things now. And we need to do things better because we need to be more concerned about waste and environmentally friendly reagents.
Methane is a greenhouse gas, but it is cleaner-burning than petroleum gas. Goldberg said it escapes from the earth when petroleum is being pulled up, and is either ignored or burned.
Karen Goldberg: Those things will actually contribute to our greenhouse gases. So, using it is a much better idea.
There is a process for converting methane gas to liquid fuel, but Goldberg said it is an expensive and energy-intensive process which requires a large plant. Goldberg hopes to create a simpler way to do this chemical reaction.
Karen Goldberg: Methanol is a liquid similar in chemical structure to methane. The difference is, it just has an extra oxygen atom in there. So methane is a molecule that has one carbon atom bound to 4 hydrogen atoms. If you could break just one of those carbon-hydrogen bonds and insert an oxygen atom in, you would form methanol.
With collaborators at the University of North Carolina, Goldberg recently discovered that a complex containing the rare metal rhodium can bind to methane. She said that binding the methane would be an intermediate step to the metal breaking the carbon-hydrogen bond.
Our thanks today to the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation.
I hope Dr. Goldberg is successful at finding an energy efficient means to make the conversion. We’re going to need a lot of methanol for spinning reserves (on-line back up power sources). Either natural gas or nuclear power (or both) are the only base load energy sources that can make solar and wind even remotely viable over the next several decades. Until a new energy storage technology is invented the best we can do is mix renewable energy with traditional, more reliable energy technologies.
Nuclear capability earth-friendly ??? nuclear is filthy – the utilised nuclear waste includes a half life of hundreds to a huge number of several years – it by no means goes away or becomes much less hazardous to humans and other existence on the earth – when the nuclear plant has an accident and melts down there goes that aspect in the planet, possibly for decent – feel Chernobyl in Russia, three Mile Island in the US -( that was a close to miss). The websites in Russia is nonetheless toxic to this day. To not mention there’re a great target for terrorists, in the event you are paranoid. Pv, wind, and so forth. is achievable in Canada, photo voltaic works anyplace the sun hits, you have wind, perfect ?? one can find lots of other methods to produce fresh electricity.
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